Niagara Falls is arguably the greatest geological wonder in Canada. The first written record of a visit to the falls was by Louis Hennepin in 1678 during which he proclaimed it “the most beautiful and altogether terrifying waterfall in the universe”. But of course, Indigenous inhabitants had been marveling at this magnificent expression of natural power for thousands of prior years.
The Falls profoundly affected the way humans see the Earth. Prior to the Age of Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no real concept of deep time and the age of our planet - the Earth, after all, was proclaimed to be 6,000 years old. As early as 1789, Robert McAuslan suggested that the Niagara Gorge was created over “many thousands of years” by comparing the location of the falls at that time to Louis Hennepin’s observations made over 100 years prior. Sir Charles Lyell, the famous Scottish geologist and author of the Theory of Uniformity, refined that concept during his Niagara Falls visit in 1841 by painstakingly calculating that the Niagara Gorge had taken an incredible 35,000 years to advance from the crest of the Niagara Escarpment to its then present position. That span of time was later found to be roughly 12,500 years, but nonetheless Lyell’s boldness and methodology is commendable.
The work of Lyell clearly played a role in how the Niagara gorge was viewed by its visitors, including Charles Darwin, who was in the early stages of writing on the Origin of Species, first published eighteen years later, in 1859, by writing:
What a wonderful fact this break down of old Niagara is - how it disturbs all the calculations about lengths of time
-Charles Darwin in a letter to Charles Lyell, March 12, 1841
Charles Lyell had another profound effect on our understanding of the River: He was the first to notice what we now know as the St. David's Buried Gorge at the southern lobe of the Whirlpool. It was formed prior to the formation of the current Lower Gorge between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago during a period of interglacial melting. Infilled with a variety of glacial sediments, it marks the ancient northward route of the Niagara River, from the Whirlpool basin through Niagara-on-the-Lake to the current shore of Lake Ontario. The Niagara Gorge we know today began over 12,000 years ago as a 12m waterfall at Queenston. It steadily eroded Paleozoic sediments upstream until approximately 5,000 years ago when it broke into the previous Niagara Gorge and ‘reoccupied’ the southern part of the gorge, upriver from the Whirlpool.
Figure 4: Evolution of the Niagara Gorge (after Eyles, N., 2002)
